43S News

[burkhard]

Wow, Didier, thanks! Your links were most informative but yet incredibly perplexing...

I tried registering on the Swiss Micros forum to post last week, but I'm not approved yet,

I hope the Swiss Micros team is able to exercise some "gentle persuasion" on correcting this one aspect of the proposed design. From both forums' responses, it seems like *nobody* favors the "Layout C" except its designer (whom I agree with on almost everything else). That's really unfortunate, as the people whom this product is aimed at are rabid HP devotees. They are well-familiar and expect either Layout A or Layout B. Making a new layout for something as critical as the math operators doesn't enable ease-of-use for your Core market, something key to industrial design.

We (mostly) all use computer keyboards that are either QWERTY, QWERTZ, or AZERTY. There are historical reasons for this, and while it isn't either the most efficient nor the order we learned the alphabet, we stick with it because it is a standard in multiple types of devices and we've all learned that way and had years (or decades!) of muscle-memory burned in. If somebody came out with a product that forced using the Dvorak layout, its market would be very limited. There is already a relatively small market for a 43s sort of calculator. I would think it wouldn't be wise to similarly constrain what is already a niche market with a non-standard layout.

I love the WP-34s layout... why monkey with the heart of it so much? That was well-considered. I would hope this might be a gentle evolution upon it.